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Why not just do it the easy way?

Well I've learned that there is a much easier way to do this. Use a program called html2jpg blackbox. It's a command line app that generates thumbs from URLs.. It will even generate a thumb 100px X 500px long with the full content of the website. (If you tell it to.) Good stuff, worth the price if you're serious.

also you have to give the apache permision to run the script
so here is the settings u have to do :
Start>Run>services.msc
Right click "Apache...", select properties.
Click on the "LOG ON" tab
Check the box "Allow this service to interact with desktop"
Click OK
Restart Apache

As concerned to taking web page snapshot, I found a PHP class at http://phpclasses.php-start.de/browse/package/918.html . This class uses a application named Hypersnap to capture the web page snapshot.This class is simple and opens the desired url in the browser window and takes snapshot of the page by calling Hyperspan application. It also uses the gd image library to scale the captured image.

When i run the code, the code did the work , but the snapshot of the page was entirely black. The image was just black.

If you have a copy of the class and and checked the code plz suggest me why the snapped image was just black and nothing else.

So, I just read the whole thread and got some interesting ideas. Have few questions though:

- Download HQscreen.exe 1.0.8 version.
- Got the little wsh script. (I have no clue how to script in windows so please bare with me) What should file extension be when I save it?
- Can I place this on my linux web hosting? Would it work?

I know some of these might be stupid questions...but I need to figure out how this works.

There is a way to do it using Imagemagick ( may have already been posted but I have not read though the whole thread ).
I am not at home at the moment but if anyone is interested I will look it up again when I get home.

Quite frankly, this IS possible.. There are sites out there that allow you to preview a site on numerous different OSs/Browsers right? They have to simulate this as well, so it just HAS to be possible! :P

a script came with my download of imagemagick called xsnap that says it will take a snapshot...it might work with a web site but here is the script http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/sepp/ima.../scripts/xsnap
the problem is that i dont know how to make the script work...i havent triend it yet...really i dont know how to use imagemagick at all
also will this work on a webhost?

The imagemagick forum can be a bit stingy giving out information but you can also take a screen shoot of a windows page; so you could write a bit of code to open a window on clicking a link which would open the page and take a screen shoot of the page but you need an "X Server" what ever that is !
Searching the Imagemagick forum will also explain how this works.

EDIT: JUST FOUND 2 DEFINITIONS FROM GOOGLE
This is the program that runs on the user side of the X Window system. This program draws the windows and performs all tasks required to draw on the screen and accept user input.

In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays. It is the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces on Unix, Unix-like operating systems and OpenVMS, and is available for almost all modern operating systems.